They shouted loudly as they could, and became instantly still. Echo sent back to them their voices, Hunch's shrill scream dominant over Bill's round full tone. In the wave of sound Benner's plaintive cry was almost drowned. Bill clapped his hands; he was overjoyed.
"It'll work, it'll work," he exclaimed, "and the dwellers in cities will thank me, thank Bill Kellar when he perfects his Echo Sound-softener. I am going to rig up a combination of walls that will reverberate sounds, most of which will die before they reach the drum of the ear. It will just slip over the ear easily and fit it comfortably. Two people wearing sound-softeners can converse easily on the streets, undisturbed by the noise of drays, street-cars, stages, and the shouts of the drivers."
Bill broke off abruptly here. He had become excited, and was nervously afraid his hearers did not understand him, so he ceased description and remarked:
"You will see just how it works when I get it done."
Blind Benner said he was sure it would succeed. Hunch was silent for a while. Presently he observed:
"Last winter my ear-lugs shet up my hearin' purty near, and I hed ter punch a hole in 'em, and then I didn't hear very loud."
Bill looked at the goblin leering at him in the moonlight and wondered how much mockery, how much earnestness there was in his words. As for Blind Benner, he was so much vexed as to lose his patience. Yet, willing to avoid a quarrel, he asked Bill how his violin did.
"Well, very well," Bill replied. "Last night I named her Magdalene, for in her dwell seven devils of fascination. She went before me, and I followed. We climbed heights, we plunged into depths, until I fell prostrate, worn out in the chase after the phantom, Music, who smiled on me pityingly as she stepped into her star chariot drawn by flying meteors."
Blind Benner, enraptured, cried:
"Go on, go on."